We Need Your Feedback!

Like all product units at Microsoft, we are very interested in your feedback as we plan our next release of Commerce Server.

One of the key themes for our next release is to provide a single, unified setup experience. In order to best do that, we need to optimize which platforms are supported.

Our current proposal for the next release is to support and optimize for the following:

1) Operating system:The next version of Commerce Server will support Windows Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2, and only the 64-bit version. By doing this, Commerce Server gains the benefits of 64-bit performance, and keeps up to date with Windows Server releases: Windows Server 2008 R2 and all future versions of server software will be 64-bit only. One change we’re proposing will be to drop support for Windows Server 2003, which is moving out of primary support and into extended support in July 2010. By choosing Windows Server 2008, we can also choose to support IIS 7 exclusively, and get the benefits of IIS 7 integrated mode.

2) SQL Server:The next version of Commerce Server will support SQL Server 2008 only, plus pre-release testing for the next version of SQL. As with the proposed OS support, we’d like to focus on the most current and next releases of SQL Server. This does mean dropping SQL Server 2005 as a supported database platform.

3) SharePoint:SharePoint 2007 (both MOSS 2007 and WSS 3) will be supported and we also plan to support the next version of SharePoint.

4) BizTalk:The BizTalk adapters are not changing, and they will be tested for compatibility with the upcoming BizTalk 2009 release.

5) Dev tools and platforms:Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will continue to be supported (as it was with CS2009) and we’ll add support for the next version of Visual Studio as well. We are also looking at supporting Windows 7 and/or Vista x64 as a development platform.